…FROM BAD…

Stage 46 / Thursday 11 June / From Roncesvalles to Erro / 18 km

 

Ah, what a special atmosphere, last night in the immense hostel of Roncevaux where pilgrims from the four corners of Europe and even beyond are piled up. All happy to have passed the difficult stage of the Pyrenees, there are lively conversations in various languages mingled with bursts of laughter, flashing cameras — one could almost believe he is in the arrival hall of a train station at the start of summer vacations with families finding each other …

 

But this morning the atmosphere is quite different. Many are complaining of sore muscles, and a few limp in pain toward the gite’s cafeteria on their blistered feet. “I’m sore here,” says one, “Me, it hurts there,” says another. As for me, I feel the beginning of inflammation in my Achilles tendon above my right heel; it’s a bit swollen, causing a mild but continuous pain. At the table for eight where I have breakfast, the scoreboard shows 5 to 3 in the match Pyrenees versus Pilgrims. Only three veterans are not complaining, but I discover later that they used a transport service for their backpacks, how clever!

 

“Bad pain! Evil! That is well worth a good reflection. Well? Good? Why good when it’s about bad (pain)?” I say to myself as I heft my pack and set off on the path … uh, slowly … for the beginning of tendonitis make me understand how much more difficult it is to calmly reflect when a pain is throbbing in my heel. I don’t want it to get worse: I’ve already seen a good number of hikers, young as well as less young, forced to abandon the walk due to severe tendonitis. The only remedy then is complete rest. In Moissac, there was a young athlete in tears over it.

 

The worse an injury gets, the more the pain increases, as if one were following a downward spiral of suffering, deeper and more serious. Aggravation … heavy [in French: grave] pain: I notice it is not trivial to use these words from the same root (in French) as the word “gravity”, as in “heaviness.” As if pain had a natural weight, as if in parallel to the universal gravitation, it could constantly affect us, and lead one to fall when you don’t want to! Do we not say, moreover: “Slide on a slippery slope into evil”?

 

This sort of progressive sliding into evil, as on a gentle slope at first, which gets steeper and steeper toward a precipice, is to be opposed to its contrary, the good, which is not symmetrical to it. Do we not say “Lift oneself toward the good, climb the ladder of holiness”? As if the slope was suddenly more difficult, to the point that the effort to do good necessitates a ladder from the beginning … This seems clear in Jacob’s dream where he sees the necessity of a ladder to climb to Heaven. Another dream follows in which he wrestles with a mysterious personage who reveals himself to be God (Genesis 28 and 32). It is easier to fall into evil than to lift oneself to the supreme good!

 

These degrees upward show the perseverance one must have when deciding to try to do good. At no time does one have the impression that it’s getting easier. On the contrary, it seems that the degrees become increasingly further spaced out as one tries to climb the ladder. That would explain how much more painful is the fall of those one doesn’t expect to see faltering: I think of these televangelists caught with their hand in the till, or the scandal of priests renouncing their vows of chastity. One easily understands the hesitation of so many people to resolutely throw themselves on these dizzying paths. It seems so much easier to do good ... a little … but not too much because that would mean committing to so much more!

 

There are degrees of evil just as there are degrees of good, and most of us prefer not to go too far on the path of evil, nor climb too high on the ladder of good. Degrees in the “bad,” here are a few progressive examples: 1) forgetting a birthday or anniversary is small; 2) a divorce is worse, especially if it affects children who cannot understand it; 3) the final solution, the extermination of Jews advocated by Hitler and the Nazis is an extreme evil, nearly incomprehensible. In the same way, there are degrees of pain: 1) the simple headache; 2) a high fever that levels you; 3) an inflammation of the sciatic nerve which makes you crawl on the floor in pain.

 

In the other direction, there are also degrees of happiness caused by good which surprise you. Here are three in growing order: 1) a stoplight that turns green as you approach it (“Little joy!” my father used to say when that happened); 2) a winning ticket in the church lottery, which gives you dinner for two in an excellent restaurant (yum, yum!); 3) the birth of a healthy child who smiles from his first feeding (I knew that joy, and would qualify it as overflowing!) I note in passing that these perceptions in the degrees are relatively subjective. There are those who find no pleasure in a meal outside their home, and others that find babies exasperating. Others accept a high fever more easily than a headache …

 

This judgment of good and bad being a relatively personal question finally, I wonder if there exists an impartial referee on these questions. As far as I’m concerned, the question of evil is initially to be considered as a religious question, but with careful reflection, one can approach from other angles which don’t have this connotation. The conceptual angle, for instance, as I do in these notes. Or the ethical angle, as sociologists or philosophers would do. The latter are committed to dissociating the notion of good and evil from notions of reward and punishment wielded by the religious bodies. They seek to avoid the emotional response which arises in the comparison of paradise with Gehenna.

 

This said, is a conceptual response more satisfactory? Does it comfort evil’s victim better than a religious response, sometimes more bearable warm than a cold philanthropic reasoning? For example, can one coldly make a comparison between various pains, and logically establish levels of relative degrees in evil? Can one reasonably judge definitively if there is more or less pain in three people with toothaches than in one person with three toothaches? And can we accept that the cold arithmetic logic of the law of retaliation “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” (Exodus 21:24) better serves humanity than the warm Christian invitation of “To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well” (Luke 6: 29)?

 

Beyond the comparison among evils and their degree of severity, is it conceivable that good can compensate evil? And even “ransom” it? There is a doctrine called “reversibility”, which cardinal John Newman (1801-1890) admired and which led perhaps this Anglican to the “catholic plenitude.” Reversibility is the principle originating from the dogma of the communion of saints, according to which the suffering of the just benefits the guilty. There is a “substitution,” in that the expiatory virtues of the saint’s sacrifice in the name of the sinner buy back the evil committed by the guilty.

 

My ancestor Joseph de Maistre (1764-1821) made it the foundation of a theory which underpins all his writing. In the mystic case of communion of the saints, the innocents would then pay for the guilty: each just person suffering voluntarily in imitation of Christ on the cross, would not only satisfy for himself, but would contribute to obtaining the “great indulgence,” that is to say universal redemption! There is indeed food for thought! But can one then go as far as accepting that killing a human being then sacrificing oneself to save another would be a fair compensation?

 

I see that the notion of evil has already deeply brought me to talk about it on a religious level, that of “salvation.” But without going further in this lifesaving concept, can one propose that the sick person’s fever combats pain with pain, in that it is a means by which the organism gets rid of what is disturbing it?

 

The Christian religion sees at the origin of the notion of sin, which makes no sense in the animal kingdom, an “original” human sin, a refusal to obey, a fall challenging the future in the Beyond. A single god, the true God, according to this religion, would have the power of decision on this future! One wonders if, without God, nor the Beyond, evil as such would exist? But in that case, it shouldn’t be more of a problem than before the arrival of Man. This problem of evil, is it a sure indicator of the existence of God and the Beyond? Astounding! Here I am going in circles again, I wander [erre in French] and I arrive at … Erro! But I also realize that in such good cogitating on evil, I have no longer noticed the pain in my heel …